Happy New Year, people! Or should I say, bots, since there will be no one else reading this. (I should find where the stats live on this thing. Or maybe not.) Here is where I solemnly proclaim my new year’s resolution to blog once a week – nay, twice a week! Daily! Upon the hour! – but let’s not set ourselves up for failure on the first day of the year. Well, on purpose. No doubt I am failing immeasurably in multiple different ways right at this moment. God, this year sucks already. Way to bring it down, self! But no; it’s a gorgeous day and the baby is sleeping and when she wakes we will go to the dog beach with the dog, to make him happy since the new year fireworks last night made him sad. (He wasn’t sad for long. He never is.) So here’s where I slap up some photos again and pretend you know what’s been going on. It’s weird, because I read YOUR blogs and twitters, so I feel like we’re all caught up; but I guess you may have no idea what I’ve been doing. This:

TADAAAAHHHH!
I present to you, a fully functioning human. With a fountain pigtail. My work here is done.

Christmas Day outfit, complete with ruffly bum.
I did not buy this, but fully endorse its use.

Chillin’ out by the lake.
Sand was not the delicious treat she had been hoping for.

The tongue is in, but only due to the interestingness of vegemite toast. And spots instead of stripes, but close enough. Please to note the hair is growing back in, a sort of blonde-brown at present, with most odds leaning towards blonde as we head for summer.

And now I now dazzle you with a general smorgasbord of happenings so you forget I was absent:

Sooooo, this is pretty slack. I have excuses! Well, mostly one excuse. She’s quite small but takes up an inordinate amount of time. Also, it was my birthday and I got an iPad. I thought I would barely use it but as it turns out, it has barely left my hot little hand and I don’t remember the last time I turned the computer on. Totally unprecedented and I have actually changed my Internet workflow to accommodate it. The shame. Therefore I am trying to figure out how to blog via iPad before this thing withers up and dies completely. I now have a little dongle thing which lets me transfer my camera photos (issue 1) and the wordpress app installed (issue 2) and I think I have a way via Instagram to actually post said photos (very major issue 3). Let’s find out, shall we? Also I think I need a keyboard. My hands already feel like they’re crunching up into claws.

Last time we talked, baby Alice looked like this:

Well, usually she is more sort of upright. And although it looks like the Frog has dropped her, in fact I laid her on her side and she raised her leg and arm. Tricksy!

The Hair. You are jealous.

Someone found a cosy place to sleep. I had to put a saucepan in the pram for a week or so until he reluctantly admitted defeat.

Baby Jail! Confined while we helped friends move house. This is last week, Alice is five months old and the hair is finally making a break for it. It all fell out in the bath over about three days… floating on top of the water in a thick layer. I hope it starts growing in again soon as I barely recognise her.

On nom nom.

And this is yesterday at Fed Square in the freezing cold. She has to wear hats now to keep her head warm. Yes, many of the hats have ears. I’m not made of STONE here, people.

So now you’re up to date. It’s all going well and finally my habits of talking to myself in public and pulling ridiculous faces are paying off. The Frog dog is happy with all the company during the day while he maintains his busy sleeping schedule, and walks well with a pram. As shown the Orange Cat is doing less well on the sleeping front but is holding his own. And unfortunately the other cat, who has been turning more and more feral over the past few months until we could barely touch him, met his end on the busy road. I am sick of losing cats so we will be sticking to the one remaining representative from now on. He is a ginger, true, but we have to work with what we’ve got.

This year is going really fast. Just me? Maybe. My parents have just been here for two weeks and now they have gone home and the baby is bored. And no one is hanging out my washing. OUTRAGEOUS.

I spent $7.50 to dress my baby in a shark sunsuit I knew she’d only wear once. WORTH IT.

And as per commenter Cas’s suggestion, I am changing the baby’s blog pseudonym to Alice. WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THIS. So Alice it is… only because I don’t think Shark Girl will really catch on.

Oh, and if you look at the top of the page there, there are more photos under the Photo A Day meme. Mind the gaps. Although I often take photos every day, it’s not always the RIGHT photo. As it were. I’ll plug the gaps when I get a chance. Probably.

Hi again! I am still here. In fact I am almost always here; here, being the couch. Here, being the internet – not quite so much. I am having to learn to do a lot of things via the iPhone. Yesterday I downloaded a feed reader thing and I can read blogs! At 3.45am! That’s what I want to be doing at that time of the night, for sure! Well, that and playing Words with Friends. Turns out everyone knows the tricksy Q and X words but me. Still! I am nourishing a human and increasing my vocabulary, all at the same time!

I am sorry but I have nothing but photos. And none even of the Frog; he has sadly taken a back seat in the photo department. Actually this is mainly because he has developed the same allergy type thing he had last summer, and is currently in the process of scratching himself bald, so he is rather less photogenic. Admittedly I took photos of him with a giant wound on his head, so maybe photogenicity is not my aim here (is that a word? spellcheck says that isn’t a word. It seems like a word to me) but never mind.

I stick my tongue out at you.

HAAAA I totally stuck my tongue out at you! Did you see?

Three! Ah ah ah! Three different spotty items! I love! To count! And buy dotted things!

Hi! I am still here. Mostly I am here one-handedly, as my lap area and one hand is often out of commission these days. Last night I messaged with my mum using the On Screen Keyboard, as I couldn’t reach the actual keyboard and only had use of the mouse. Did you know there was such a thing as an On Screen Keyboard? Neither did I, until necessity forced it upon me.

Anyway, how are you? We are fine. Thanks for all your lovely messages about AJ; she is great (especially at the moment, as she is sleeping and also wearing very cute clothes) and we will be keeping her. She arrived one day early which shocked the life out of me as I myself have never been early for anything. I often MEAN to be early, but it very rarely happens. Anyway, all went well, considering my birthplan was the very vague, “I want the baby to be healthy and I don’t want to die myself”; as far as I was concerned, all else could be negotiated. In the end I was extremely lucky (and have to thank my mother for very good genetics) as I had a 5-hour natural labour with no issues. I will politely avert my eyes as you gnash your teeth with disbelief; alternately I am more than happy to listen to your horror stories of 40-hour labours and emergency C-sections and hideous after-effects, all of which happened to friends of mine and all of which I was fully expecting to happen to me. So I am certainly not complaining, and nor am I claiming some sort of uber-birth powers as quite frankly the whole thing was totally out of my conscious control. And so here we are, with a three-week old currently napping on my chest. And already I feel guilty as I should Move The Child Off Me and have her sleep on her own; but eh. She’s three weeks old and I like having her here. Also did I mention the cute outfit?

As for her name, AJ is her first and middle initials. I am more than happy to let you know her name if you want to know it; I just won’t write it here for privacy reasons. Who knows what sort of sentient powers the internet (or, probably, The Internet) will have by the time she is computer literate (ie. probably in about 4 years). In fact The Internet could be reading this… er, reading itself… RIGHT NOW. (…and I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.) Regardless of her actual name, she mostly gets called The Squirrel around here anyway at the moment. Why? I don’t know. She just is. Same reason the dog is the Frog, I guess. And he has been fine with her, of course; he does try to lick her, and drink her bath water, but apart from that he mostly ignores her. I’m sure this will continue right up until the point where she starts eating proper food and learns to drop it for him, at which point he will follow her around as a devoted servant.

Some photos below, mostly of the non-humiliating kind. I am saving the humiliating kind for when she screams for three hours straight (again) and I crave revenge.

In her carseat/capsule thing after coming home from the hospital. It was crazy cold that day; and yet now a few weeks later we have just had a mini-heatwave. Melbourne: unpredictable weather doesn’t even BEGIN to cover it.

ALL THE HAIR. She has the hair of five babies. Seriously, it is still growing and it is now almost in her eyes. It doesn’t seem to be falling out yet, either. It makes it very hard to pick who she looks like, too; our current consensus is that she doesn’t look like either of us. Elfin changeling baby!

Baby Update: No baby! Well, you knew that. I will tell you when there is one. Well, there IS one, it’s just freeloading off me and my delicious iron. Stop eating all the iron, baby. And the calcium. It’s not manners.

Apart from that, things are fine. I was about to roll into a rant but really, it’s been going pretty good. I no longer run anywhere, or pick up things other than with my toes, and I can only wear about three items of clothing (how can I pack a hospital bag when I am currently using/wearing the things that should be packed?) but Melbourne’s weather has not been overly hot, my feet and ankles have not swollen to prodigious proportions, I can still sleep and I take it on faith that I still have a lower body, even though I can’t really see it. Maternity leave is an odd thing and I have baked many a slice and cleaned out cupboards and sewed stuff and put up the Christmas tree and all manner of things that I had not gotten around to before. I am trying to stop Pulling Stuff Out To Organise, and instead concentrate on Putting Stuff Back So The House Looks Presentable; harder than you might think, considering the tiny house and the sheer amount of stuff I have pulled out. I have a LOT of stuff. A LOT. And that was before the Baby Paraphernalia began marching into the house; a march which I’m sure will only continue at ever greater rates once there is, you know, an actual Baby to be using the Paraphernalia.